Rudolf Khametovich Nureyev (17 March 1938 - 6 January 1993), Soviet-born dancer, was one of the greatest male dancers of the 20th century, alongside Vaslav Nijinsky and Mikhail Baryshnikov.

Nureyev was born in a train near Irkutsk, while his ethnic Russian mother was travelling across Siberia to Vladivostok, where his father, a Red Army political commissar of Muslim Tatar descent, was stationed. He was raised in a village near Ufa in Soviet Bashkiria. As a child he was encouraged to dance in Bashkir folk performances and his precocity was soon noticed.

Due to the disruption of Soviet cultural life caused by World War II, Nureyev was unable to enroll in a major ballet school until 1955, when he was sent to the Vaganova Choreographic Institute, attached to the Kirov Ballet in Leningrad. Despite his late start, he was soon recognised as the most gifted dancer the school had seen for many years. Already, however, his extremely difficult temperament was evident.

Within two years Nureyev was one of the Soviet Union's best-known dancers, in a country which revered the ballet and made national heroes of its stars. Soon he enjoyed the rare privilege of travel outside the Soviet Union, when he danced in Vienna at the International Youth Festival. Not long after, for disciplinary reasons, he was told he would not be allowed to go abroad again. He was condemned to tours of the Soviet provinces.

It was during this time that Nureyev came under investigation by the KGB, as he was known as having relations with "known homosexual men", a situation that would soon change his life forever.

Defection to the West

In 1961 Nureyev's luck turned. The Kirov's leading male dancer, Konstantin Sergeyev, was injured, and at the last minute Nureyev was chosen to replace him on the Kirov's European tour. In Paris, his performances electrified audiences and critics, but he broke the rules about mingling with foreigners, which alarmed the Kirov's management. The Kirov's Management and the KGB wanted to send him back to the Soviet Union immediately, which, contrary to popular belief, was due to the fact that KGB agents had been investigating him for quite some time, as by that time they were going to take serious action against him for being homosexual. As a subterfuge, they told him that he would not travel with the company to London to continue the tour because he was needed at home to dance at a special performance in the Kremlin. He correctly believed that if he returned home he would likely be imprisoned. It has been the more popular and accepted belief that he "leaped to freedom" in order to be more of a "free artist", though many of Nureyev's private accounts of the events in Paris in 1961, as well the accounts of many of his close friends, tell that he stayed in the west due to the consequences of living in Soviet Russia and being gay. So, on 17 June 1961, at the Paris Airport, Rudolf Nureyev defected.

Within a week after defecting, Nureyev had been signed up by the Grand Ballet du Marquis de Cuevas and was performing The Sleeping Beauty with Nina Vyroubova. Nureyev was an instant celebrity in the west. His dramatic defection, his outstanding technique, his good looks, and his astonishing charisma on stage made him an international star.

Nureyev's defection also gave him the personal freedom he had been denied in the Soviet Union. On a tour of Denmark he met Erik Bruhn, another dancer ten years his senior, who became his lover, his closest friend and his protector (mainly from his own folly) for many years. The relationship was a stormy one, for Nureyev was highly sexually promiscuous. Bruhn was director of the Royal Swedish Ballet from 1967 to 1972 and Artistic Director of the National Ballet of Canada from 1983 until his death in 1986.

Although he petitioned the Soviet government for many years to be allowed to visit his mother to whom he remained very close, he was not allowed to do so until 98, when his mother was dying and Mikhail Gorbachev consented to the visit.

During this visit, he was invited to dance once again with the Kirov Ballet at the Maryinsky theatre in Leningrad (now renamed Saint Petersburg). Most observers who reported on the event said it was a very disappointing performance because Nureyev was well past his prime. Nontheless, the visit gave him the opportunity to see many of the teachers and colleagues he had not seen since he defected, including his first ballet teacher in Ufa, where his mother lived.

Fonteyn and Nureyev

At the same time Nureyev met Margot Fonteyn, the leader British dancer of her time, with whom he formed a professional partnership and a close friendship. Their first performance together was in Giselle on March 1, 1962. Audiences were shocked by the chemistry between two dancers who on the outside were so different. During the curtain calls, Nureyev dropped to his knees and kissed Fonteyn's hands, an action which cemented their on and offstage bond. The rest, as they say, is history. She brought him to the Royal Ballet in London, which remained his base during the rest of his dancing career.

Together Nureyev and Fonteyn forever transformed such cornerstone ballets as Swan Lake and Giselle. Fonteyn and Nureyev premiered Sir Frederick Ashton's ballet Marguerite and Armand, a ballet that would become almost completely associated with their partnership. In addition, Fonteyn and Nureyev premiered Kenneth MacMillan's Romeo and Juliet. Films exist of their partnership in Les Sylphides, Swan Lake, Romeo and Juliet, and other roles. Throughout their career together they were famous for receiving hysterical, unending curtain calls. In 1967 the twosome were even arrested together in the Haight Ashbury district of San Francisco after a party they were attending was raided by anti-drug police.

Fonteyn and Nureyev's relationship was not just onstage. Offstage, they became lifelong close friends, even after her retirement to Panama. They were known to giggle their way through practices. They often fought too -- Nureyev was not a patient person, and was known to curse at Fonteyn when practices did not go well. Nevertheless, anyone who ever knew them said Fonteyn was the dearest person to Nureyev's heart, and Fonteyn in turn was fanatically loyal to Nureyev. When Fonteyn was suffering from cancer Nureyev paid many of her medical bills and visited her constantly despite his busy schedule. Observers described them as "level Z" friends. Towards the end of Nureyev's life, when his body was wracked by AIDS, Fonteyn urged him to start a career conducting, and he did, to some success. According to Meredith Daneman's biography of Fonteyn, when Nureyev admitted that his body was too wracked with disease and injury to dance, and he was considering conducting, Fonteyn exclaimed, "Darling, that's perfect!!!" Nureyev once said of Fonteyn that they danced with "one body, one soul."

Later career

In 1964 he came to the Vienna State Opera, where he remained as a dancer and chief of choreography till 1988.

Nureyev was immediately in demand by film-makers, and in 1962 he made his screen debut in a film version of Les Sylphides. In 1976 he played Rudolph Valentino in Ken Russell's film, but he had neither the talent nor the temperament for a serious acting career. He branched into modern dance with the Dutch National Ballet in 1968. In 1972 Robert Helpmann invited him to tour Australia with his own production of Don Quixote, his directorial debut.

During the 1970s, Nureyev appeared in several movies and toured the United States in a revival of the Broadway musical The King and I. His guest appearance on the then-struggling television series The Muppet Show is credited for boosting the series to worldwide success. In 1982 he became a naturalized Austrian. In 1983 he was appointed director of the Paris Opera Ballet, where as well as directing he continued to dance and to promote younger dancers. Among the dancers he groomed to stardom were Sylvie Guillem, Isabel Guerin, Manuel Legris, Elisabeth Maurin, Elisabeth Platel, Charles Jude, and Monique Loudieres. Despite advancing illness towards the end of his tenure, he worked tirelessly, staging new versions of old standbys and commissioning some of the most groundbreaking choreographic works of his time.

Personality

Nureyev's talent, beauty, and charm caused him to be forgiven many things, but stardom did little to improve his temperament. He was notoriously impulsive and did not have much patience with rules, limitations and hierarchical order. Some saw this as unreliability and rudeness to those he worked with. He mixed with Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Mick Jagger and Andy Warhol, and developed a reputation for intolerance of non-celebrities, but he kept up old friendships in and outside the ballet world for decades, being a loyal and generous friend. He was known as extremely generous to many ballerinas, who credit him with helping them during difficult times. In particular, the Canadian ballerina Lynn Seymour says that he often found projects for her even when she was suffering from weight issues and depression and had trouble finding appearances. He helped an elderly and increasingly impoverished Tamara Karsavina. His interests were widespread and he loved to discuss all kinds of subjects, showing an amazing wealth of knowledge in many fields.

By the end of the 1970s he moved into his 40s and faced the inevitable decline of his amazing physical prowess, he unfortunately continued to tackle the big classical roles for far too long, and his rather undistinguished performances in the late 1980s disappointed many of his admirers. Towards the end of his life, he was wracked with the ravages of AIDS, but he still worked tirelessly on productions for the Paris Opera Ballet. His last work was a lavish, beautiful production of La Bayadere which closely follows the Kirov Ballet version he danced as a young man. At Margot Fonteyn's urging, he also started to conduct concerts and ballets.

Influence and AIDS

Nureyev's influence on the world of ballet changed especially the perception of male dancers; in his own productions of the classics the male roles got much more choreography than in earlier productions. The second very important influence was his crossing the borders between classical ballet and modern dance by dancing both, although having been trained as a classical dancer. Today it is absolutely normal for dancers to get training in both styles but Nureyev was the one who started this and it was a sensation and even much criticized in his days.

When AIDS appeared in France in about 1982, Nureyev, like many French homosexual men, took little notice. He presumably contracted HIV at some point in the early 1980s. For several years he simply denied that anything was wrong with his health: when, in about 1990, he became undeniably ill, he pretended he had several other ailments. He tried several experimental treatments but they did not stop the inevitable decline of his body. It is believed that some of his closest friends, including Margot Fonteyn, knew about his status but out of loyalty kept it secret. Towards the end of his life, as dancing became more and more agonizing for him, he resigned himself to small non-dancing roles, and dabbled with the idea of becoming a conductor. At the urging of Fonteyn, he had a short but successful career as a conductor, which was unfortunately cut short due to his declining health.

Eventually, however, he had to face the fact that he was dying. He won back the admiration of many of his detractors by his courage during this period. The loss of his looks pained him, but he continued to struggle through public appearances. At his last appearance, at a 1992 production of La Bayadère at the Palais Garnier, Nureyev received an emotional standing ovation from the audience. The French Culture Minister, Jack Lang, presented him with France's highest cultural award, the Chevalier de l'Ordre des Artes et Lettres. He died in Paris, France, a few months later, aged 54.